Earl Weaver

“You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and five the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”

“The key step for an infielder is the first one, to the left or right, but before the ball is hit.”

“Bad ballplayers make good managers.”

“Coaches are an integral part of any manager's team, especially if they are good pinochle players.”

“Pitching keeps you in the games. Home runs win the game.”

“I wanted no part of losing. Why play if you can't beat the other guys more often than they beat you?”

“I think the National League has better biorhythms in July.”

“What else does a manager do but push buttons? He doesn't hit, he doesn't run, he doesn't throw, and he doesn't catch the ball. A manager has twenty-five players, or twenty-five buttons, and he selects which one he'll use, or push, that day. The manager who presses the right buttons most often is the one who wins the most games.”

“A manager's job is simple. For one hundred sixty-two games you try not to screw up all that smart stuff your organization did last December.”

“Most of the umpires, it's amazing: 98 percent of them will not hold a grudge. I always felt a couple of them did. I never wanted to argue with an umpire in my life.”

“You must remember that anyone under 30 - especially a ballplayer - is an adolescent. I never got close to being an adult until I was 32. Even though I was married and had a son at 20, I was a kid at 32, living at home with my parents. Sure, I was a manager then. That doesn't mean you're grown up.”

“The Orioles made me. I didn't make the Orioles.”

“The job of arguing with the umpire belongs to the manager, because it won't hurt the team if he gets thrown out of the game.”

“In baseball, you can't kill the clock. You've got to give the other man his chance. That's why this is the greatest game.”

“This ain't a football game, we do this every day.”

“When you play for one run, that's usually all you get. I have nothing against the bunt in its place, but most of the time, that place is in the bottom of a long-forgotten closet.”

“I became an optimist when I discovered that I wasn't going to win any more games by being anything else.”

“Nobody likes to hear it, because it's dull, but the reason you win or lose is darn near always the same - pitching.”

“No one's gonna give a damn in July if you lost a game in March.”

“A winning player is nothing more than a player on a winning team. A losing player is a guy who played on a losing team that year.”